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Sunday, March 7, 2010

Monk in Ogreland Chapter II

Whaaaaaaat is going on here? It starts off awesome, with a monk and his yak giving up on their quest to convert ogres to whatever religion the monk is, and instead get drunk using a bottle of drunkenness acquired from “dubious witches”. That sounds fantastic! I wish my drunkenness was acquired in a similar way.

The comic then continues with the drunken adventures of monk and yak (yes, the yak is drunk too). They debate what they want to come back as in the next life (“But as a duck you can walk and fly and swim...”), run away from lightning, and eventually end up in a cave with a hermit who promises to show them “the happiness of perfect drunkenness” (again, I wish my drunkenness was like that).

And then the comic just...stops. Instead there’s page after page of a bizarre “debate on reality” between the monk and the hermit. They tell each other “projections”, which are stories about various animals that may, or may not, exist (horned rabbits), and how they reflect various ways of viewing/living in the world. This is not what I want! I want drunken monk in ogre land. It is illustrated, but it’s mostly just huge blocks of text I don’t really care about. Even the yak says “this is getting really confusing and random. It gives me a headache” before going outside to watch lightning.

Several more pages of discussion later there is an utterly bizarrrrrre comic section where the yak is assaulted by three women in hooded robes who untie the thing on the yak’s back (wait, that’s a monster?!), strip, lick the yak, make out with each other, then climb inside the mouth of the blob monster. What the fuck!? Then it goes back to more debate (though this time there are some pretty rad pictures of dragons), before the debate ends, and the comic finishes a couple of pages later.

What’s going on?! I do really like the art though. The yak looks so cuddly and friendly! No wonder those naked girls were hugging him. And Celso manages to get so many emotions out of the yak just from his eyes (the only visible part of his face). The other characters look good, they’re weird and kinda scratchy, but I think it works well for the type of story that’s going on (when the story is going on at least).

There’s also a really neat little insert, “The Proverbs of Ogyrland Book II”, which is a tiny little zine taped onto a picture of that book appearing on a bookshelf. So cool!

I want to read more monk and yak adventures, but I’m not so down with page after page of bizarre debate on the nature of reality. I’m at least going to have to check out issue one to find out what the hell is going on in this story though, so stay tuned!

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